Drown Out the Noise with Blank Newspapers

Are you sick and tired of hearing or reading the news, legitimate or otherwise? In this day and age of fake news and alternative facts, and some people’s seeming inability to tell the difference between real and satire, it’s probably best to just drown out all the news altogether.

This is the driving principle behind the Nothing in the News, a newspaper project from Sideline Collective, which erases all the contents of newspapers worldwide. So what you are left with is a paper with blank columns and the newspaper’s name on top.

Sideline Collective is not a political organization. On their Facebook page, they describe themselves as “a small collective whose sole objective is to make great creative work. Non-conventional work. Work that comes out of nowhere and cuts through all the noise. Stuff people like to talk about. Stuff people remember.”

The company’s objective is laudable. On their website they express their disdain for society’s obsession with being constantly in the know – not only about things that matter, but more disappointingly, about nonsensical things like Kylie Jenner’s latest lipstick or the latest trending cat videos, or even worse, baseless conspiracy theories that a lot of people actually believe. (Can you say doomsday preppers?)

They write, “Yes, we live in particularly sensitive times. Times where the truth really matters, and where newspapers have a more important role to play in modern democracies than ever before. But for a society addicted to breaking news, gossip, and celebrity status, to Facestagram and Twapchat, the latest trends, and the top tens, to sports punditry, conspiracy theories, cat videos, and ridiculous amounts of porn … for this cultural precipice, we offer the one thing you need more than anything else: “Nothing”. Absolutely nothing. Today, and today only, there is Nothing in the News. Enjoy it whilst you can.”

The idea of “nothing” has never sounded so good, when the alternative is a whole bunch of useless somethings.

In one of my philosophy classes, epistemology, I believe, our professor stated a law, which will forever resonate with me. He said, “Between something and nothing, there is no middle ground.”

This is not to say that the Sideline Collective adheres to the fallacy of false dilemma, or when things are presented as an “either or” situation. It is also known as “all or nothing fallacy,” false dichotomy, fallacy of false alternatives, and a lot more.

They adhere to the law of excluded middle or the principium tertii exclusi, which states that “for any proposition, either that proposition is true, or its negation is true.” Truly the negation of somethingness is nothingness.

The Sideline Collective has taken their stand. They are Team Nothing which, to me, says a whole lot of something.